AN EPOCH-MAKING EVENT
The capture of Constantinople is rightly regarded as an epoch-making event. It meant the end, once for all, of the empire which had served so long as the rearguard of Christian civilization, as the bulwark of the West against the East. Europe stood aghast at a calamity which she had done so little to prevent. The Christian powers of the West have been paying dearly, even to our own time, for their failure to save New Rome from infidel hands.
180. THE OTTOMAN TURKS IN SOUTHEASTERN EUROPE
CONTINUED OTTOMAN EXPANSION
Turkey was now a European state. After the occupation of Constantinople the Ottoman territories continued to expand, and at the death of Mohammed II they included what are now Bulgaria, Rumania, Serbia, Albania, and Greece. Of all the Balkan states only tiny Montenegro, protected by mountain ramparts, preserved its independence.
NATURE OF TURKISH RULE
The Turks form a small minority among the inhabitants of the Balkans. At the present time there are said to be less than one million Turks in southeastern Europe. Even about Constantinople the Greeks far outnumber them. The Turks from the outset have been, not a nation in the proper sense of the word, but rather an army of occupation, holding down by force their far more numerous Christian subjects.
THE TURKS A MIXED PEOPLE
The people who thus acquired dominion over all southeastern Europe had become, even at the middle of the fifteenth century, greatly mixed in blood. Their ancestors were natives of central Asia, but in Europe they intermarried freely with their Christian captives and with converts from Christianity to Islam. So far has this admixture proceeded that the modern Turks are almost entirely European in physique.
[Illustration: Map, EMPIRE OF THE OTTOMAN TURKS AT THE FALL OF
CONSTANTINOPLE, 1453 A.D.]